20 May 2012

When it comes to ACTA and TPP, China is the elephant in the room -- or maybe that should be the dragon in the room. For without China's participation, these treaties designed to reduce counterfeiting will have little effect. And despite rather desperate optimism on the part of some that China will rush to sign up, itscomments so far suggest otherwise.

As the mobile phone moves closer to the center of daily life in many parts of the world, combining phone, computer, camera, diary, music player, and much else all in one, it becomes a concentrated store of the digital DNA that defines us -- who we talk to, what we search for, who we meet, what we listen to. However convenient that may be for us as users, it's also extremely dangerous if it falls into the wrong hands.

On Monday I posted my talk "Before and After SOPA".
In it, there's a reference to "country club" treaties (slide 17) that
may have intrigued some people. It's a term I came across recently, and
I think provides us with a useful way of thinking about ACTA (and TPP).

Even though just about every objective statistic suggests otherwise, the copyright industries still take turns bemoaning the terrible toll that piracy is supposedly taking on their markets. So it's good to come across some official figures that suggest the contrary, particularly because in this case they come from the European Audiovisual Observatory—not a market research company, but a public service body. Here are the latest numbers for the European film industry:

Last week Techdirt wrote about the possible introduction of an "opt-in" license to view porn online in the UK. As we noted then, there is nothing to stop parents from installing their own filters to block access to certain kinds of Web sites now. But it seems that soon, they won't even have to do that:

Ten years ago, people were saying that open source would never be
able to best proprietary software. But what they overlooked was the
fact that Apache had already beaten Microsoft's IIS Web server offering back in the mid-1990s, and had never lost that leadership once.

Words matter -- just think of the number of times flame wars have broken out in Techdirt's comments over whether you can "steal" music or films. But one phrase that nobody really questions is "orphan work". And yet, as Lydia Pallas Loren points out in a brilliant paper, this is a loaded term with a very particular agenda:

A few weeks ago, I gave a talk at the Reykjavik Digital Freedoms Conference with the title "Before and After SOPA".
Much of it will be familiar to readers of this blog, since it was
reviewing the events around the extraordinary anti-SOPA Internet
Blackout Day on January 18, which has now emerged as a turning-point in
Net activism, and exploring what might happen now. As usual, I've
embedded my slides below, and they may also be viewed online and downloaded.

12 May 2012

Over the last few months, Techdirt has been reporting on the amazing rise of the German Pirate Party, with win after win after win.
Politicians in the other parties have looked on aghast, powerless to
halt the rise of something they clearly can't fathom. Inevitably, the
fightback has finally begun, but packaged as an artists' revolt, not
simply that of the copyright industries worried about their profit
margins.

When discussing ACTA, there's a natural tendency to concentrate on
the bigger players -- the US or the EU -- but it's important to remember
that there are many other countries involved. One of those is
Switzerland, which has just joined the doubters' club by holding off
from signing ACTA. Here's why (French original):

The problems of monopolies arising through network effects, and the
negative effects of the lock-in that results, are familiar enough. But
it's rare to come across an entire nation suffering the consequences of
both quite so clearly as South Korea, which finds itself in this
situation thanks to a really unfortunate decision made by its government some years back:

Whatever you might have thought of his policies, Nicolas Sarkozy
probably had more impact on European copyright policy than any other EU
politician. He consciously tried to the lead the way in bringing in
more extreme copyright enforcement, most notably with the "three
strikes" HADOPI law.

A few weeks ago, I wrote
about how businesses based around giving stuff away were able to make
money by replacing far more expensive options. One aspect of that is
that open source leaves money in people's wallets. The other side, of
course, is that purveyors of more expensive options tend to lose out.
That's a pattern that is being repeated across different industries -
not just in the software world.

What an extraordinary year this has been for Net activism. After the great SOPA blackout led to SOPA and PIPA being withdrawn, and the anti-ACTA street demonstrations
triggered a complete rethink by the European Parliament that may well
result in a rejection of the treaty, now it seems that the Trans Pacific
Partnership is falling to pieces.

One of the beloved tropes of the copyright industries is that they
are being destroyed by online piracy. Superficially, it's a plausible
claim, not least because of the false equation of copyright infringement
with "theft", and the lingering suggestion that every time something is
shared online, a sale is lost. Of course, as Techdirt's report, "The Sky is Rising", demonstrated from publicly-available figures, the facts are very different: all of the creative industries are thriving.

05 May 2012

Neelie Kroes gave a keynote speech at this year's re:publica conference in Berlin
(disclosure: I spoke there too) that brought together many of the
themes she has touched on recently -- the open Web, copyright licensing,
the potential of open data, and the need to provide enhanced Internet
safety for children. Interesting and important as all those are, they
pale into insignificance beside the following comment she made:

It would be something of an understatement to say that the world of
public libraries is undergoing rapid change at the moment. On the one
hand, the rise of open access
means that people are increasingly able to find information online that
was formerly held in serried ranks of volumes stored on library stacks.
On the other, publishers' reluctance
to allow ebooks to be lent out puts a key traditional function of
libraries under threat. So what exactly should public libraries being
doing in the digital age? Eric F. Van de Velde has written a a fascinating exploration of that question, along with a few suggestions.

Techdirt has published several posts recently about the growing anger
among scholars over the way their work is exploited by academic
publishers. But there's another angle to the story, that of the
academic institutions who have to pay for the journals needed by their
professors and students. Via a number of people, we learn that the scholars' revolt has spread there, too:

About Me

I have been a technology journalist and consultant for 30 years, covering
the Internet since March 1994, and the free software world since 1995.

One early feature I wrote was for Wired in 1997:
The Greatest OS that (N)ever Was.
My most recent books are Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution, and Digital Code of Life: How Bioinformatics is Revolutionizing Science, Medicine and Business.